Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.
Here dozes one against the wall,
Disposed upon a funeral chair.
A Degas dancer pirouettes
Upon the parting of his hair.
See how she spins! The grace is there,
But strain as well is plain to see.
Degas loved the two together:
Beauty joined to energy.
Edgar Degas purchased once
A fine El Greco, which he kept
Against the wall beside his bed
To hang his pants on while he slept.
Belief might lend them life again. I tryLike orphaned Hamlet working up his griefTo see my spellbound fathers in these menWho, breathless in their amber atmosphere,Show but the postures men affected thenAnd the hermit faces of a finished year.The guns and gear and all are strange untilBeyond the tents I glimpse a file of treesVerging…
Falling is what it loves, and the earth fallsSo in our hearts from brilliance,Settles and is forgot.It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red ballsTo shake our gravity up. Whee, in the airThe balls roll around, wheel on his wheeling hands,Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheresGrazing his finger ends,Cling to their courses there,Swinging…
At just that crux of time when she is madeSo beautiful that she or time must fade.What use to claim that as she tugs her glovesA phantom heraldry of all the lovesBlares from the lintel? That the staggered sunForgets, in his confusion, how to run?Still, nothing changes as her perfect feetClick down the walk that…
A last shawl of burning liesOn a gray field-stone.All cries are thin and terse;The field has droned the summer’s final mass;A cricket like a dwindled hearseCrawls from the dry grass.
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.II.We milk the cow of the world, and as we doWe whisper in her ear, ‘You are not true.’
Through the horror of snow I dreamed,And so I had no fear,Nor was I chilled to deathBy the wind’s white shudders, thanksTo the veils of his patient breathAnd the mist of sweat from his flanks.It seemed that all night through,Within my hand no reinAnd nothing in my viewBut the pillar of his mane,I rode with…
